Inessentials: The Blog

I’ve decided I need a car. Nothing fancy, no frills, no bells and whistles. Just something to get me from here to there and back again (one of the great alternate titles of all time). I’ve been living in New Haven, CT, for something like 14 months now. I sold my 1990 Chevy Lumina (dual side airbags, spacious back seat) before making the 1000 mile trek from Wisconsin. My thinking: it would be financially and environmentally irresponsible for me to have a car while a graduate student. It is a needless expense in a state with car insurance rates that would make a European blush. And, I figured, for the first time in my life I live in an honest-to-goodness city, somewhere that I don’t need a car to get by day to day. It is true that I have survived day to day without a car, but only thanks to the supreme kindness of friends.

What concerns me is the psychological toll. The automobile is quintessentially American. At any moment of any day, I can sit behind the steering mechanism of a 3000-pound metal box on rollers and travel to millions of unexplored locations throughout the hemisphere. The freedom of having that option is fundamental in the American (modern?) psyche. It’s that freedom that I am without here. It doesn’t matter that the money I’m saving by not having a car could fund trips to exotic locales and major world sites. Not being able to leave New Haven at 3:00am and go somewhere, anywhere, is what is distressing.